Best Imaging Software

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Flogger23m

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I want to make an image of my Win 7 OS install. Already did it with Acronis True Image 2014, which saved it as a .tib file, but I recall having troubles using its cloning features some months back. I have some doubt that the .tib/Acronis will work if I need it. Is Macaroni Reflect a good alternative? Or is the built in image creator in Win 7 worth using? That can be helpful as no extra software is needed.
 
Macrium Reflect is my imaging software of choicem and AOMEI Backupper is great as well. Both have free versions that can do the basics.
 
Never had any issues with Acronis but have also used Macrium and EaseUS Todo Backup Free. All have worked fine.

I've used the Windows 7 image backup as well and have done multiple recoveries with it, always worked fine.
 
True Image offers disk to disk (under the Tools and Utiilties when you use the bootable media, not the Windows version of the application)) so there's no real need to do an intermediate image unless you just like having such a thing around (even if it's just temporary). I've been using True Image since basically even before it was public knowledge (was an early member of their original beta pre-release) and all I can say is that I've never lost or had an image not be restorable for any reason with the software itself (had drives physically die on me but the actual True Image software wasn't the cause).

Even the slightly stripped down version of True Image you can get from Western Digital or Seagate for use with their branded drives (even just one of them in a system qualifies you to use it) allows for the disk to disk operation iirc but I could be wrong so don't flame me for it if that aspect is also stripped.

Clonezilla does disk to disk as well and that's of course completely free period, and yes there are many other products that can do it too like Macrium Reflect and so on.
 
I have used Acronis since around 2008 with no problems at all. When making an image make sure to exclude your data directories for a smaller backup image. I use WinSCP to backup to my FreeNAS box and Robocopy to back up to my external hard drive.
 
Flogger23m said:
Or is the built in image creator in Win 7 worth using? That can be helpful as no extra software is needed.
Click to expand...

Was never an issue for me, just make sure you do system image and not just a backup.

There was a problem with Windows 7 and using UEFI. The bootloader for re-imaging was not UEFI compatible, so even though the Windows install was on a UEFI system, the bootup disk wouldn't actually load. Windows 8 fixed this, but the Windows 8 boot disk would not allow a Windows 7 image.....dumb.

Maybe they have fixed this by now on Windows 7. But I doubt they would have fixed that.
 
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